Buying a Recruiting Tool? Identifying Recruiting Goals and Challenges

Kristina Martic | 8/16/2017 | Recruiting

Buying a recruiting tool is a number one priority for many recruiters and other HR professionals in 2018. Startup or an enterprise, talent acquisition has become one of the most challenging, yet crucial, strategies necessary for every firm’s growth and development. When buying a recruiting tool, identifying your recruiting goals and challenges should be the very first step. This approach will make the decision about which recruiting software to buy much easier.

Buying a recruiting tool

Even though there are many different things to consider when buying a recruiting tool, there is a proven strategy that helps in making the best decision.

Identifying recruiting goals and challenges

Based on different stages that candidates go though, companies may have different recruiting and hiring challenges. I have identified the most common challenges based on 6 different stages of a candidate journey. Going through these stages will significantly help you in identifying what type of a recruiting tool do you need.

Recruiting challenges in the candidate awareness stage

Candidate awareness is a stage that never stops. This stage doesn’t include only communicating your job opening, but also making candidates aware of your employer brand and employee value proposition at all times. Knowing your challenges in the candidate awareness stage, make decision making about recruiting software purchase much easier.

Recruiting challenges in the candidate consideration stage

Consideration stage is the stage in which you are trying to convince candidates to consider your company or organization as their employer of choice.

To be able to pick the right recruiting tool, identifying recruiting goals and challenges in this stage is crucial. This is not an easy process, especially today when a lot of employers are putting much time and effort in it.

The key here is to have a clear candidate engagement strategy for the candidates that have become aware of you.

Having a good candidate engagement strategy has become extremely important in the world of HR and recruiting, especially for some hard-to-fill roles. If you don’t offer useful content, timely and engaging communication, you are likely to lose them over your competitors.

Recruiting challenges in the candidate interest stage

Do you know what are your recruiting challenges when it comes to making candidates interested in your company? Once you have made candidates aware of your company or a job opening, had them to consider you as their next employer, you want them to express the interest in your job opening and move to the next, application, stage.

Recruiting challenges in the candidate application stage

If you don’t have many job applicants, you need a recruiting tool that offers solution to this problem. After you have moved a candidate through the previous 3 stages, the challenge becomes to turn them into applicants. It is not uncommon that, after you manage to attract candidates and convince them to consider you as a new employer, you bring them to your career site, but they never apply.

Common challenges in the candidate application stage include:

Complicated and not user-friendly application forms

Application form not mobile-optimized

Inability to track new visitors on your career page

Inability to track where the new visitors are coming from

Inability to track application form abandon rate and get insights on why candidates leave.

Recruiting challenges in the candidate selection stage

This stage starts at the point when you have job applicants, and ends with a new hire. That being said, there is still much work to do. At this point, you should have high-quality applicants, and you are moving to the hiring process. Unfortunately, many companies’ struggles don’t end here. Moreover, for some of them struggles start here.

Common recruiting challenges in the candidate selection stage include:

No centralized database of all the candidates and applicants

No easy way to review and triage applicants

Messy candidate database

Hard to find candidates’ profiles

No centralized database of rich applicant and candidate profiles

No streamlined candidate workflow

Applicants interview kits, assignments and scorecards

Hard to efficiently share information with other recruiting and hiring team members

Communication and interview scheduling is a manual and time-consuming process - no automation

No structured applicant email campaigns

Too much paperwork and spreadsheets

Challenges in the candidate hiring stage

Once you have selected a candidate, recruitment marketing and ATS usage stops. However, for companies that use solutions such as HRIS, it is important to have the ability to integrate.

Common challenges in the candidate hiring stage include:

Inability to integrate ATS with HRIS tools

Inability to integrate with employee onboarding platforms

Inability to integrate with employee management platforms.

Which Recruiting Software to buy?

Now that we have identified all the possible recruiting challenges an HR professional or a business owner can be facing with, let’s move to the next chapter that will help you identify a type of a recruiting software should you buy. The main goal of the following chapters is to define types of recruiting software, such as ATS and Recruitment Marketing.

If you are looking for a 2-in-1 solution, schedule a demo with our team to see how we have helped companies showcase their Employer Brands, attract talent, and streamline their hiring efforts.